On 2012.01.04 18:59, Bernd Blaauw wrote: > Getting USB drives bootable can be a real challenge (unpartitioned > versus partitioned, geometry, BIOS-quirks, maximum compatibility etc).
Yeah. That's why I tried to stay as close as possible to the HP utility as it seems to have the best rate of success. I'm also currently overriding the partition table to create a single one, but at least the Windows formatting utility allows preservation of existing partitions so that's something I have some plan to look into. > http://www.reactos.org/getbuilds/ > However this alpha-state ReactOS doesn't have any type of USB-support > yet. Some NT-compatible stack was present but only supported keyboard > and mouse. Over time it will change likely. > ( http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=9937#p86219 ) Thanks for the pointers. I guess I'll wait for ReactOS to get there. > You mean your RUFUS program can take an ISO, a CD-drive or the current > drive it's running from (if it's a CD-drive) and copy it either contents > or the ISO to USB Flash Device? The way I see it at the moment would be ISO files only (but it could be extended to pick files from an optical drive), and duplicate the file structure to the FAT32 USB partition we create. Then tweak a few things (add syslinux, locate the original bootloader and create a .cfg for it, etc) to make it bootable. That's what Universal-USB-Installer does. > I wonder if the so-called ISOHYBRID feature can work for DOS. It's a > single imagefile that can act as partitioned HDD image as well as > CD-image. [http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=13581]. It > allows booting an image as ISO or as HDD, thus also allows writing the > image to USB Disk in raw-mode. Creating another partition out of the > left-over device space is an entirely different matter. That's good info, but looking at the isohybrid utility source, it seems it simply relies on the bootable ISO using a version of isolinux that supports hybrid booting. Obviously, since Rufus is a Windows application, I want the bootable ISO -> bootable USB feature to support recent Windows installation ISO media, so I don't think ISOHybrid will help there. Having looked more closely at what Universal-USB-Installer does (which does supports recent Linux distros as well as Windows installation disks), I think I will use a similar process for the time being. > As for FreeDOS to USB, most convenient is either extracting contents or > copying the ISO entirely, added by installing SYSLINUX (or GRUB) and > using MEMDISK to load the ISO. Then you get a CD in system memory that > can act as installation/live medium. Drawback is that DOS kernel will > enumerate USB disk as C:. Disabling boot-time partition driveletter > assignment could help (patches required for FreeDOS kernel), leaving > things for runtime (except no run-time driver exists for that). Obviously, I'd like to support FreeDOS ISO too, though it would seem a bit weird to me to have a tool that can create a FreeDOS bootable USB, yet uses memdisk or syslinux to boot from the FreeDOS ISO on USB. I'd rather copy the files directly onto a FAT partition and let FreeDOS boot FreeDOS... If you guys think it could be useful, once I have sorted ISO support, I could probably produce a dedicated version of Rufus that embeds (or downloads) a FreeDOS 1.x ISO and then create an USB bootable version out of it (keeping the same structure and boot process as the ISO). Or I can add iPXE as an additional boot option, and perform the steps highlighted below. > Ancient systems only I think. My preference would be a bootdisk with > Syslinux, loading iPXE and then installing FreeDOS on local system with > internet as source CD-image. > [ http://lists.ipxe.org/pipermail/ipxe-devel/2011-August/000834.html ]. And now I've learned that gPXE has been superseded by iPXE. At least adding an iPXE boot option to Rufus is definitely a good idea, so I created an enhancement request for it. Regards, /Pete ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ridiculously easy VDI. With Citrix VDI-in-a-Box, you don't need a complex infrastructure or vast IT resources to deliver seamless, secure access to virtual desktops. With this all-in-one solution, easily deploy virtual desktops for less than the cost of PCs and save 60% on VDI infrastructure costs. Try it free! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Citrix-VDIinabox _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
